Friday, July 5, 2013

Next Pacifist Gaming Challenge- New Vegas

I’m really getting into this pacifist gaming idea, and am
looking for the next challenge. Fallout:
New Vegas seems to the next one on the list. Just ordered it from Amazon.

Fallout is a long running,
post-apocalyptic series that has a bizarre publication history. It started close to 20 years ago as a remake
of a game called Wasteland, produced by a company called Interplay. The studio in Interplay that built the game,
Black Isle, was eventually dissolved, and the developers split up and
eventually formed a new company called Obsidian. Obsidian found a niche in making
intellectually superior sequels to games other companies put out, and
occasionally generating their own intellectual property (like Alpha Protocol). Fallout: New Vegas is an odd merging
of these two. Technically it is a sequel
to Fallout 3, by Bethesda Games Studio, which acquired the license to
Fallout. However, all of the original
producers and writers of Fallout 1 & 2 now work Obsidian, and they
simply picked up their notes from their own cancelled Fallout 3 and
merged them to Bethesda’s game engine.

Okay, enough gamer politics. The cool thing is that one the best game
developers/writers, Chris Avellone, worked on the game. Avellone’s list of projects is a roll call of
all of the cool, quirky role playing games of the last few decades; games like Fallout
1 & 2, Alpha Protocol, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith
Lords, Plansescape: Torment.
Avellone also writes game that let you look for alternatives to
violence. Take for example this
screenshot of a pacifist run through New Vegas.